Up Through the Water (9 page)

The crowd cheered. Emily watched the girls in the ring claw and kick. The dark-haired one straddled the other. Emily felt the mud squish between her stomach and another's. Both arched up into familiar pinup poses. The referee circled like a dazed bear.

Birdflower grabbed her hand as people all around started to stand. He shouted, “Baby, let's go somewhere civilized.” Emily heard this, but just smiled and ran a finger down the curve of her cleavage. She was already wriggling in the mud. There were other shapes approaching her, moving on her. Emily watched the women push each other's face into the mud. One wrestled the other's top off. Emily fingered the nipple of her breast. The muddy top was held up like a caught fish. The chanting was louder and Birdflower's hand tightened on hers. He used his head to signal toward the door. The cheering voices were like an ocean.
You can't tell them apart,
she was thinking.
They could be anyone.
She could see only through a mass of men's legs and around their hips, a jungle of body parts. Slithering like some new animal, she found her way, feeling the mud on her neck and between her legs. She'd slip off her dress and roll till, if she lay still, no one could find her. Only her light eyelashes would rise out of the mud like seedlings. She was very close. Only a few men to pass. She went slowly, squirming all her parts forward.

A hand tightened on her arm. “Where the hell do you think you're going?”

She knew him and watched him carefully through slit eyes as he pulled her through the crowd toward the exit sign.

Emily did a dead man's float in the motel pool. The moon was like an earring she once lost. Inside, Birdflower was lulled in sleep by the air conditioner's steady breath. She'd come out to stand on the diving board and do an easy striptease, T-shirt then panties floating near her like huge petals. Lazily she lifted her head for air and saw herself in an aquarium, a fish floating sideways, cloudy-eyed on top.

There were plate-sized lights underwater. A
NO DIVING AFTER MIDNIGHT
sign, scattered lawn chairs, and a vista of two long double-decker rows of motel rooms, clipped shrubs, and the late night stars above. Emily preferred the ocean—she backstroked from blue ceramic side to side—but this was nice, clean water on her skin; her body a showpiece, a trained porpoise doing laps. She floated, toes arched skyward, and sank into an underwater somersault. Because her mouth was dry, she sidestroked to the spigot under the diving board. There was one childhood moment she always remembered. She'd walked to the rabbit cage the neighbors had in their backyard. Inside the mother rabbit had been slouched over, showing her nipples, a baby rabbit attached to each one. Off to the side, there had been a dead one covered with a dozen flies. One of that rabbit's eyes gazed loosely into the straw. And she'd stood there at six or seven, her hands climbing into her shirt for her own nipples.
This is me,
she thought and turned her head up to the sky.

Emily left the spigot and dived underwater. Swimming along the bottom, her belly grazed the pool floor like a blue-gray shark.

She floated on her back: body down five inches, head a mask above water. She had seen Eddie walking barefoot along the main road with Lila. He'd dropped her hand when he saw Emily's car. She spread her arms and legs out wide like angels in snow. Maybe now he was on the beach with her, their hair blown back from their faces, Eddie's head flipping from the moon to the girl's blouse whipped tight around her. She had to be careful what she said to Eddie about girls, because her feelings were irrational; she felt jealous and oddly suspicious of the intentions of a local girl like Lila.

Emily rolled over and over like a kid circling down a hill. John Berry might be on the ferry tomorrow. His face was unclear. She remembered now just a vague beefiness around his upper thighs and the coarse quality of his hair.

Emily held to the side and kicked small tight scissor cuts. As though it was boiling, the water bubbled around her. Birdflower opened the door of the room and stood by the small outside light in his underwear, his long braid over one shoulder like a girl's. He climbed down the stairs, cleared the metal fence, and squatted by the pool's edge. She saw his body pinprickle as he lowered himself in and with one hand loosened the band of his braid.

“Let's not go back,” he said.

Emily laughed and splashed water at him. She swam to the darkest edge of the pool.

In a quick head-thrown-freestyle he trailed her, cornering her, and pressed his body against hers. Emily's back rubbed tiles.

“No way,” she said.

“Come on,” he said.

“Everybody lives on an island.” Their wet heads bobbed above water. Emily said, “Some just aren't out in the ocean.”

“You're so profound,” Birdflower said, his hands resting on each side of her rear.

Open-mouthed and falling, Emily kissed him. She saw at eye's edge a light flicker on in the first-floor row of rooms and a man at the window, looking up to the unanimous night sky and then holding a drink high as if in a toast to her.

ELEVEN

MERIDIAN

W
ind moved
the small Cape Hatteras office. John Berry flipped photos like cards into the circle of light in the middle of the room. He shuffled to one of himself and Emily on the beach, beers in hand and a bonfire in the background. Her face was flushed and her hair fell into a center part and blew slightly forward. That night, everyone had been so drunk around the fire, singing songs and one guy telling about times he went out on a late-night shrimper with his father, and how the trollers would gather around the boat with the best storyteller, and how that man's voice would whisper into the scene of lantern lights nodding from boat to boat. Near sunrise, John Berry had awoken with Emily's full weight on top of him and he'd carried her to the truck as the sun inched up. He folded the photograph. The next was of him and his father, both in Bermuda shorts, standing in Wanchese Harbor. That was the last time his father had been off the island before he died. For a minute John Berry looked into the tiny eyes of his dad and was oddly lonely for him. But his father had not minded dying. Earlier in his life he'd said right out that he'd seen more change on the island, and in the world, than his father had and probably more than John Berry ever would. At the graveyard, on a bright June morning, one which seemed to take away all the gloomy corners and uncertainties of death, John Berry had stood near his father's grave, and as the first shovel of dirt was pitched down, he threw in a handful of white sand. It sprayed up like the points of a wave, dazzled, then landed—pelting the coffin hundreds of times.

His thumb pressed on the gloss of a large one—Emily red-eyed from the flash, in a green halter dress, her glass held up for New Year's Eve. Around her waist were four creeping fingers. He held the photo near his hand to see if they matched. There was a hint of stray knuckle hairs—but how could he really tell? He threw the photo. It flipped backwards and flapped down. Pulleys rang against the flagpole and the aluminum office hissed.

John Berry checked the windows, no cars yet on his side. The green and red channel markers blinked out in the water and beyond he saw the dim winking lights of the island. A van's high beams threw light on John Berry's face and showed his finger pulling down a venetian blind. The lights flipped off and the van's engine rattled.

He looked into the shoe box; shiny bits of color were mixed and jumbled in the rectangle as if his whole life was the turning end of a kaleidoscope. Looking out at the two people in the van, he saw that they were kissing, and before long, he realized it was them.

The tick of the clock beat out pairs of seconds as Emily snuggled her head onto Birdflower's shoulder. A camper pulled in behind the van and a sleepy-looking woman tipped ashes from her cigarette out the window.

He'd get the pellet gun from the truck, shove it into his pocket, and force Birdflower to swim out and grab the last dock pole. Then he'd get into the van and drive Emily over the water to the white house, to their life as it had been.

He gathered the pictures off the carpet. The ferry was maneuvering its mass into the dock. John Berry slipped out of the back, gently resting the door behind him. The deep ferry whistle sounded. He got in his truck and inched the door closed, ignited the engine, and flipped the gear shift into reverse. In snapshots, John Berry envisioned the next scenes, one after another, blurred and hectic. The wheels of the truck straightened and he headed for the curving line of cars.

John Berry stood above the deck, his beige windbreaker making an empty rustle. He watched them talk. In the solitude of swishing wind and water he rehearsed his speech to her. Lines he'd written on scraps of paper for a month formed themselves on his lips.

A light in the van went on and the hippie got out and walked starboard like a drunken Indian against the wind. John Berry bolted to the deck, passed a line of orange preservers on the white wall, and paused at the van's door.

She saw not what she expected—Birdflower back to draw her into the big pink sky—but John Berry, and her hands went up to cover her face from the memory of the bottle and the glass spindrift. He got in and she pressed her body against the door. Through her fingers she saw him in long fractures.

‘'I'm sorry,” he said.

She lowered her hand. Seeing the cuts, he reached to her temple and brushed the tiny speckled ones shaped like seeds. She flinched, and he took his hands back and rested his forehead—rough hair everywhere—on the wheel. “I want to come home,” he whispered. Wind sputtered through the windows.

“Well, you can't.” She heard her voice reverberate off the front window, the floor, and the bucket seats.

“Please,” he said.

She shook her head. “Too much has happened.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

“Get out,” she said in a tired voice.

He placed a hand on her face. With his fingertips he stroked the curve of her neck, and made her ease and press against his hand. “Let me come back,” John Berry said.

Emily didn't answer. His hand firmed around her neck, and he said it again slowly. She rolled her head.

“I might kill you,” he said and opened the door, all the time thinking,
What is this? what now?
"Those scars,” he said. “One for every man.”

Birdflower watched John Berry run from the van into the metal archway and down into the bowels of the boat. He saw Emily's startled face through the glass and knew he should give her a moment. John Berry's rounded shoulders had looked like his own. It was as though he had watched himself scurry away. Her past lives moved and changed, spit out stories, made her wild some days and quiet some nights. The curtains which somehow delineated past and present would part and from the backstage of her life a player would come to add some scattered scene.

Birdflower opened the van door. His hands moved across the eternity of the front seat. Their fingers meshed and she pulled him back in.

*  *  *

John Berry's ears rang. It was the way he thought atom bombs would sound: a falling hiss then a long tone signaling the end. Behind his temples he felt a red ache which sent thin spears of color to his eyelids. He kept forgetting if he loved her or hated her. Ahead, the van circled Silver Lake inlet and rattled out of sight. They're going to the long-hair's house. John Berry slowed. “Let ‘em,” he said. “Let ‘em get stoned and eat wheat crackers.”

He flipped the wheel and headed down the sand road, thinking up confrontations. She never spoke, just came in and stood there with the corners of her mouth set and her hands dangling as if weightless and blown against her thighs.

In her driveway he turned off the engine and left the truck. The air smelled early. The screen door banged behind him. Everything was as it had been. He moved through the house, stopping at each doorway. He paused at her bedroom. Through the branches of a hunchback cedar, leaf-light moved on the pillow and the bed made with a crazy quilt: thunder-shaped patches of red flannel and heart-like pieces of men's dress pants. The same posters of black girls with flowers in their hair and palm trees and huts behind them. He rested on the bed. Collected in a box near the door were his razor, belt buckle, and flashlight. He thought of her quite casually picking up something of his—maybe the ivory-handled brush—and begin to move the bristles through her hair, but the handle would heat up as she realized it was his, and she'd drop it and kick it over to the box, get a rag, and carefully, holding it away from her body, put it in.

On the bed he found the way he liked to sleep best, one arm behind her head and the other snuggled under her waist. He scanned the room from his cheek-flat position. His blue pants, a pair he had trouble getting into, were slung over the chair. The hippie wears them, he thought. He sat up, went to the dresser, and began dumping drawers. He saw her, in the doorway, then on the bed. With one hand he whipped across the dresser, spraying her perfume, hair combs, and creams against the wall. He thought he saw her face in the mirror and her image moving in photos stuck along the edge. Her lips were telling him things she didn't know, listing his secrets, his crazy thoughts. Faster, her voice high now, hissing into a sound like rushing water. With his teeth he tore a hole the size of his fist between the legs of her pants.

“Hey,” Eddie said from the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“I came to get my stuff,” John Berry said.

“You gave my mother scars.”

“And you better believe she gave some to me.”

“You could have killed her,” Eddie said.

John Berry pulled the quilt off the bed and stuffed it into the pillowcase. “Get out of my way,” he said as he threw the bag over his shoulder.

“You're a prick,” Eddie said.

At first impulse John Berry held a hand up to slap him, but he saw Eddie was shaking and he moved around the boy. The bright light from the door gave them both grainy auras, made their movements seem blurry and slow. He walked out of the house, one foot on the shaded cement steps, then the other on the next, and out across the yard. He climbed inside his truck and started the engine.

“She's better than all of you,” Eddie screamed from the porch.

As John Berry turned from the loose sand driveway onto the gravel road, he watched the boy in the rearview mirror. Eddie was leaning against the cottage, sliding down like a water drop on glass, his arms wrapped around himself.

Feeling sorry now, John Berry pushed the horn and raised his hand. He waved, waited, but Eddie would not look up. He felt angry at Eddie. His face reddened, he pressed the gas pedal and spun out, throwing up pebbles into the morning sky.